Barack Obama: I won't martyr Osama bin Laden

Senator Barack Obama has said that Osama bin Laden should be brought to
justice in a way that would prevent the terrorist leader becoming a martyr.

Mr Obama refused to detail what approach he would take to bring bin Laden to justicePhoto: REUTERS

By Alex Spillius in Washington

5:52PM BST 19 Jun 2008

Seeking to portray himself as tough enough to be commander-in-chief, the Democratic presidential candidate warned that there was an executive order dating back to Bill Clinton's presidency that allowed the CIA to kill bin Laden if capture was not an option.

"If I'm president, and we have the opportunity to capture him, we may not be able to capture him alive," he said.

Though he refused to detail what approach he would take to bring bin Laden to justice, he sought to show a more sympathetic American face to the world when he described the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders as an exemplar of sound victors' justice.

"What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he's engaged in and not to make him into a martyr, and to assure that the United States government is abiding by basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism," he said.

Mr Obama was speaking as he unveiled a new team of national security advisers that included several ex-Clinton heavyweights who had lent their support to Hillary Clinton during her battle with the Illinois senator for the party's nomination, including former Secretary of States Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher.

In an interview he meanwhile hinted that he may retain Robert Gates, George W Bush's defence secretary, who has taken the sort of pragmatic approach to the job that Mr Obama admires.

He told Time.com that "I'd certainly be interested in the sort of people who served in the first Bush administration." Mr Gates was Bush the elder's CIA director.

This year's campaign is already echoing the last election, when Mr Bush made national security the dominant issue and succeeded in convincing Americans that the country would be safer under him than Democrat John Kerry.

Mr Obama's Republican rival, Senator John McCain, a Vietnam War hero and veteran of the Senate's armed services committee, is determined to turn his national security experience to his advantage and has repeatedly accused his opponent of naivety and inexperience.

His campaign has said Mr Obama had a "September 10 mindset" and was incapable of properly appreciating the threat of terrorism.

Flanked by his experienced advisers, Mr Obama retorted: "I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States."

He continued: "Osama bin Laden and his top leadership - the people who murdered 3,000 Americans [on September 11, 2001] - have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world, That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism."

Mr Obama said Mr McCain was "going to use predictable, petty and divisive attacks to try to score a few political points on national security".

"If these attacks seem familiar, it's because they are. They come from the same tired political playbook that George Bush and Karl Rove have used for eight years," he added.

How to handle bin Laden has been a tricky question for presidents and those who would like to be in the White House. In the 2004 primary campaign, Democratic candidate Howard Dean was criticized for refusing to prejudge bin Laden's guilt before a trial.

Mr Bush has said his statement that he wanted to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" was one of the biggest mistakes of his presidency because it was misinterpreted around the world.